This could be true. Wow has less of a journey than it once had, but putting the journey or "the carrot on the stick" back into Wow doesn't have to mean creating content only 1% of the community will access. People loved Vanilla because it was new and people loved BC because it released tons of content (zones, dungeons, raids, arena etc.). Saying, 'people loved vanilla or BC because they couldn't access content' makes no sense.

Mr. Morello is an expert on LOL, not Wow. Greg Street is an expert on Wow and I doubt he knows what Wow needs. If he did, Wow wouldn't be bleeding subs. Experts have opinions that are wrong and can make bad decisions. Being a lead designer doesn't make everything you say true.

Just saying, LoL isn't as active as it used to be aswell.
On website that had the amount of hours tracking from each gamer that was logged in, Example xFire, LoL used to be far #1 with like millions of hours ahead from every game, it was even the first game that surpassed WoW.
But since a while, WoW surpassed LoL once again.
LoL is from #1 active game to #4.

Love Riot, and now love Morello. His stance is perfectly accurate and explains in a few sentences what WoW has gone through over the years.

"I realized it is the struggle itself that is the most important. We must strive to be more than we are. It does not matter that we will never reach our ultimate goal. The effort yields its own rewards." -Data

This is my opinion on the whole issue of exclusivity and, on a larger scale, what Blizzard has done with WoW.

First I'll say I can understand why they would want to let a lot of players see all the content they make. Perhaps not at every difficulty, but all of the content, dungeons and story that they create. This makes sense from a point of view of a business, which is what Blizzard is, and when you look at it from one perspective it looks like it is the best route to go: more people see content, they beat it, and then want more. It grabs those who weren't able to get into raids before and makes them feel like, for the most part, something new will be available either shortly in the future, or just after a while of waiting.

The problem is that, in my opinion, the stance has extended its reach beyond what kept WoW feeling like a game.

There has been an absolutely massive focus on convenience instead of on making the world of warcraft feel like a world you would want to be immersed in. Things like LFG, LFR, (to a somewhat lesser extent) cross-server battle grounds, and other things implemented for convenience purposes detracted from WoW feeling like a game.

It would be like if you were playing Skyrim, and every single dungeon in that game were already on your map, and you could instantly teleport to it without having to find it or go out and explore it. Then, when you arrive, you enter the dungeon, are told what boss is ahead of you, what moves they know, and how you can kill it best. It will also tell you exactly what loot CAN drop, provides you with in your face notifications of what spell a boss is casting, and when any other opponents could come out and attack you.

World of Warcraft stopped being a game for me. Instead, it became something more of a grind. The game lost its enchantment by having everything be simplified, made extremely efficient, and by having content consumed at such an enormous pace that it's like eating a meal filled with MSG. You'll just be hungry again in a little bit. I felt like dungeons and even raids, up until about Wrath or so, were like a huge meal, with a giant turkey leg, huge amounts of stuffing, and just so much you would need to take your time to get it all done. You would need to get through earlier content to reach the new stuff, but that was okay because that content was not only new, but that gear that was available then was the best you could get until you could work your way up. The content had a real sense of progression, and it gave you a feeling like you could constantly improve yourself and earn your way to seeing more content.

I know not everyone is going to agree with me, but I look at WoW, and I talk with my friends, and we all just wonder what happened. It just stopped feeling like a game after a while. It stopped feeling like it was this immersive world, and instead it was this streamlined, breakneck speed game to rush through everything and see everything in the shortest amount of time possible.

I really, really miss what World of Warcraft was, but it won't change. A guy can always hope though.

All people can access raids, in vanilla era too. The problem was that the LAST patchs before an expansion (naxx, sunwell, ruby sanctum, Dragon Soul and the incoming SoO) had always problems:
-Naxx40: Hard to get 40 users that could afford all naxx (16 bosses) in less than 4 months (why 4 months?, because the player-base moved to BC)
-Sunwell: Hardest content ingame and some problems in boss monsters.
-Ruby sanctum: Nobody care about that raid, for player-base, ICC was the las raid.
-Dragon soul: They changed from hardest content to easy content, If you want difficult, just do heroic modes. And look what happened, all player-base agree that this is the worst raid of WoW.

Do you think that, with more time to spend in finishing the attunements/raid gear/improves, the player-base could reach the end-game (with some nerfs like ALL patches before)?
I'm the only one that have faith in the player-base? Really?

No, it shouldn't change your opinion, but it's a stronger opinion than yours. As in, while you may disagree with Morello Scott (I do on some points), his expertise simply makes his opinion worth more than yours, maybe not to you, but to anyone else.

But again in what regard is his opinion stronger ? To go back on the example, if you go to a bookstore and see a book and your friend tells you that the book is really boring and badly written but on the book cover you see "Stephen King : Best book i ever read". So will you buy it because of the more educated opinion ?

Originally Posted by Brodeo

Can someone explain to me why not participating in content that is available to everyone is being confused with exclusion? Is there any other game that this mentality applies to?

Have you ever heard of the concept of difficulty ? Not everybody can do anything, no matter how much they train.

I find his comments to be at least reasonable, but I can't help but to notice that he is talking about two completely separate types of games and that his design philosophies as a developer for a MOBA game do not necessarily apply to WoW, even back in TBC times.

TBC messed a lot of things up that I think Vanilla did better (not necessarily raiding content and the like). It may have been the most popular expansion among the players that were into raiding at the time, but it came at a cost of how the rest of the game was experienced, which is what made me start playing WoW in the first place.

The game's focus on max level and end game are what truly made the game lose a lot of its original flavour and TBC started this giant snowball by how so much focus was put on end game, which made low level zones a lot less attracting and much less rewarding to progress through compared to how max level was shaping up to be. It also did not help that TBC raiding was very inaccessible because of its attunements and such, which ironically was not necessary for lower level content to feel very rewarding back in Vanilla.

That's not to say that TBC did not bring some good to the table, but its raiding and dungeon content philosophy was not sustainable in the long run, and the features and ideas that came into fruition during that time are things that are highly despised to this very day, which always makes me highly question how "good" this expansion truly was for WoW's future.

Just saying, LoL isn't as active as it used to be aswell.
On website that had the amount of hours tracking from each gamer that was logged in, Example xFire, LoL used to be far #1 with like millions of hours ahead from every game, it was even the first game that surpassed WoW.
But since a while, WoW surpassed LoL once again.
LoL is from #1 active game to #4.

That's pretty interesting. Last time I looked at Xfire was about a year ago. At that time, LoL kicked every other game's ass and was way ahead of WoW with several times more users. Pretty surprising that it's below WoW now.

It is call class variety. You want single target heal pick paladin. You want strong aoe heal get shaman or druid. every role had specific skills your class feel uniq and cool.

Having played a Paladin since Vanilla, TBC was pretty much the worst period for my class ever, one of the reasons being the one you brought up. If uniqueness all comes down to me being a single target healer, then please throw my class out the window and start over.

That's pretty interesting. Last time I looked at Xfire was about a year ago. At that time, LoL kicked every other game's ass and was way ahead of WoW with several times more users. Pretty surprising that it's below WoW now.

The incentive to raid with the introduction of LFR went down. And LFR in its current form is too easy to provide long term content for ppl. So yeah, lets hope Blizz will come up with ways to rectify the situation. Flexible raid size as 4th difficulty is kind of awkward.

Pfff...
BC is the "sweet spot" really, in which level of grind was over9000. The numbers were so high at that time because WoW had no competitors on MMO market. And people just looked at something which was new to them. Show me another MMO which held for more than 8 years and had a stable player base. It's just getting TOO OLD. Oldfags are gone, newcomers have NOTHING in terms of interest for lore or other things in Warcraft universe.
And furthermore, he should've looked into his game instead, as LoL is simply horrible in terms of social interaction. Just simply try create and acc, get into game and do everything right, and say few words to those who do that wrong. Trust me, you'll hear a lot about yourself.